1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to service processes. More particularly, the present invention relates to the use of processlets to model service processes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Business analysts, as well as line-of-business managers, are often responsible for designing and developing new business process models, or adapting existing models, to improve how their companies do business. With process models in place, a well-defined interface is established to identify and transform business processes into service-oriented applications.
Business process modeling tools enable business analysts to model, simulate, and analyze complex business processes quickly and effectively. The term “business process” does not necessarily imply that a business practice is performed. A “business process” is a service proves that provides some service for a requesting application, a user or a customer. For example, a business process may perform machine translation, digital certificate authentication, alphabetic or numeric sorting, or any other useful function.
Business process modeling tools:                Provide comprehensive, user-friendly business process modeling and collaboration tools to graphically model processes across people, partners, and applications.        Allow companies to quickly redesign processes as business needs change.        Support multiple modeling methodologies and industry standards.        Simulate and validate modeled processes and provides key performance metrics.        Provide a team environment to share and maintain versions of models.        
Many business processes can be very complex and modeling of the business processes is often restricted by the tools that allow the modeling of these processes. Some current visual tools, such as IBM Rational ROSE, WBI Modeler, and Microsoft Visio, go beyond the basic flowchart for a computer program and allow the modeling of processes. Several companies are agreeing on the use of business process execution language (BPEL) as the standard meta-language for modeling business processes. The use of the business process execution language results in executable code being generated.
Processlets are processes components that are used in modeling service process flows. A processlet is to a process as an applet is to an application or a servlet is to a server. A processlet is a process segment that has semi-independent existence. That is, a processlet has well-defined entry and exit points and the processlet's entry point may be exposed using a Web service interface and, the processlet shares these characteristics with the whole process. A process is made up of several processlets. A process accomplishes a business task and it can be instantiated concurrently to run several business tasks. Processlets are not instantiated outside of the process. Also, several other things like status reporting, versioning, and identification with a business task are all done at the process level and not at a processlet level.
However, no library of business processes and business process flows exist as such a library would require the software solution provider to expose the entire business process implementation. In order to provide such a solution, providers currently ship only one executable file or a set of executable files that work only within a given runtime or the providers ship a Software Development Kit (SDK) which provides more details on building solutions.
A drawback to such solutions, are that customization is not easy and can be very brittle, a small change may call for the entire project to be rebuilt, and output for a solution may be an extensive executable or a set of related executable files.